


half dreaming

by The_Shame_Basement



Category: Homestuck
Genre: College, Earth C (Homestuck), Fluff, M/M, Pale-Red Vacillation, Post-EriSolSprite, Purring Trolls (Homestuck), sickly sweet gay disaster boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-25 16:21:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18578128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Shame_Basement/pseuds/The_Shame_Basement
Summary: A short little ficlet about Eridan settling into life on Earth C and reflecting on his situation. A lot has changed since his sixth hatchday.





	half dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> this was for a ficlet swap in a discord server I'm in; @ my giftee i hope you enjoy it!!

If your younger self had bothered to think about what your future was going to be like, you’d bet cold cash– frond over ring-fisted nub– that your current situation wouldn’t even have been a flicker of a pipe dream. You’d always fancied yourself some grand conqueror, or a ship’s captain or something. Top of the FLARP leaderboards, if nothing else. None of those panned out.  
  
But… somehow, you don’t…  
…mind quite so much as you expected to?  
  
It’s weird to think it, much less believe it– the idea’s clunky, inelegant, and completely at odds with the person you’d worked so hard to make people think you are. Nobody really believed in that pompous sod anyways, though, did they? And now that you’ve got somewhat of a tempering influence inside the four walls of your skull, you can’t bring yourself to be nearly so het up about it as a younger, lonelier you might’ve been.  
  
Once upon a time, too, you might’ve been pissed about having anybody but yourself inside your brain– but it was nothing if not a fair trade.  
  
“Right,” you say, and the sound of your own voice pulls you out of your reverie. In front of you, humans and trolls alike sit up straighter in their seats. They’re younger than you by a generous margin, some of them just shy of the age you and everyone else was when you woke up on this world.  
  
“If it’s all the same to y’all, I’d like to get started.” You take out your pointer and tap the board precisely with it, where you’ve written CALIGULA in sweeping cursive. “Who can tell me about this guy?”  
  
Hands shoot up all across the lecture hall, and you don’t hold back your smile.  


* * *

  
You don’t need reminding to wait in your classroom once the day is over. The quiet feeling that keeps you there is the same one that sends slow, shuffling footsteps down the hall, and you glance up to see Sollux Captor standing in the doorway.  
In another time, another life, you’d have said it was like falling or flying or burning alive to see him. But you’d have been lying, because it’s not like any of those things. It’s like sitting down on a couch, or eating breakfast, or falling asleep. It almost feels like nothing at all, except for the way your shoulders relax as the missing parts of you slide back into place.  
  
There’s no standoff like there used to be. You walk to each other without hesitation and wrap your arms tight around each others’ frames, and he buzzes against your clavicle while you rest your chin between his horns.  
  
“How’d class go?”  
It’ll never stop being weird to hear him enunciate his sibilants so clearly, especially when your own tongue still occasionally trips over too-large canines you’ve never had. “Good. They listened real w-well. I think this semester’s gonna be a nice one.”  
You don’t have to look to see his monochrome eyes go all scrunched-up as he smiles, but he takes you by the jaw and pulls your face closer anyway. You grin lopsidedly and chitter at him; he goes _vvvvvvvv_ right back, nearly vibrating with the strength of his purr.  
  
You both barely need to talk– and you’ve both been talking all day, what with your history lectures and his coding seminars– but you do it anyway. You talk until your throats are sore. You walk back to your shared hive and make your separate dinners and drink in the sound of each others’ voices with no shame. He slurs when he tells you about some _vvandalism_ he found in one of the bathrooms. You catch yourself with your tongue between your teeth when you discuss your _2tudent2._ His hand ends up in yours.  
  
It’s like falling asleep– or, no, that’s not quite right either.  
It’s like waking up from a bad dream, and looking around to find everything right where you left it.  
It’s the relief of the perfectly, impeccably ordinary. It’s the normal of a glass of water: banal, unremarkable. You’d die without it.  
  



End file.
